A nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism

Old Time Kentucky: Better known in Texas than his native state, Oliver Loving died hard


By Berry Craig
NKyTribune columnist

Mortons Gap native Oliver Loving died hard.

He and “One-Arm Bill” Wilson had shot it out with more than 100 Comanche warriors in an 1867 New Mexico gun fight. Both men managed to escape, though Loving was wounded in the arm and side.

Loving’s arm became gangrenous, and he died, allegedly because a surgeon didn’t have the nerve to amputate the fatally-infected limb.

Loving is famous in the Lone Star State. But evidently he is all but unknown in Mortons Gap, the Hopkins County community where he was born in 1812.

Loving and his sidekick, Charles Goodnight, went down in history for blazing the storied Goodnight and Loving Cattle Trail. Loving County, Tex., is named for the Kentuckian. So is the town of Loving, N.M.

Oliver Loving and his sidekick, Charles Goodnight, went down in history for blazing the storied Goodnight and Loving Cattle Trail.  Loving County, Tex., is named for the Kentuckian (Wikimedia Photo)

Oliver Loving and his sidekick, Charles Goodnight, went down in history for blazing the storied Goodnight and Loving Cattle Trail. Loving County, Tex., is named for the Kentuckian (Wikimedia Photo)

Enshrined in the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, Loving supposedly inspired the character Gus McCrae in the novel and television miniseries, “Lonesome Dove.”

After Loving married in 1833, he farmed for 10 years in adjoining Muhlenberg County, according to The Handbook of Texas Online. He moved his family to Texas in 1843, eventually settling in Weatherford, where he became a successful cattle rancher. Loving sold beef to the Rebel army during the Civil War and to the U.S. government afterwards.

In 1866, he and Goodnight drove a large cattle herd from Texas to Fort Sumner, N.M., and Denver, Colo. Their route became known as the Goodnight and Loving Trail. The trip was arduous but so profitable that the partners led another cattle drive in 1867.

The Goodnight and Loving Trail crossed Comanche country. The Native Americans considered the whites and their cattle trespassers.

The Comanche force surrounded Loving and Wilson at the Black River in July, 1867. The duo was out ahead of the herd, hastening to Fort Sumner, N.M. to finalize a government contract to buy the cattle. “We were supposed to travel at night and lay up in the daytime so the Indians would not attack us,” Wilson recalled in The Trail Drivers of Texas, a 1925 book compiled and edited by J. Marvin Hunter.

No sooner did they decide to risk riding in daylight than the Comanches pounced. Wilson and Loving scrambled for cover in weeds at the river’s edge.

Wilson said he shot the Indian who shot Loving. Afterwards, the Comanches mounted “a desperate charge,” but Wilson, protecting his wounded friend, said he stood them off. The Indians fired rifles and rained down arrows, but none hit their targets.

A Comanche opted for stealth, crawling through the weeds, parting them with his lance. He nearly reached the two cowboys, but a large rattlesnake evidently frightened him away, Wilson claimed.

Loving figured his life was ebbing away. About midnight, when the moon went down, Wilson said his friend begged him to “escape so I could tell his folks what became of him.” Besides, Loving didn’t want Wilson to end up dead, too.

loving

Wilson got away, but not before he left Loving plenty of defensive firepower: a quintet of pistols, a repeating rifle and ample ammo. Armed with a rifle himself, he eased into the river and silently floated by the unsuspecting Indians in the darkness.

Wilson, weary, half-starved, barefoot and pursued by wolves, eventually met up with Goodnight and the herd. While Wilson rested, Goodnight and a small group of other cowboys galloped off in search of Loving. After discovering that Loving and the Indians were gone, Goodnight resumed the cattle drive toward Ft. Sumner.

On the way, Goodnight and Wilson met some men from the fort who said Loving was there. “The bullet which had penetrated his side did not prove fatal and the next night after I left him he got in the river and drifted past the Indians as I had done,” Wilson explained.

Loving, weakened by fever and blood loss, hired some Mexicans to take him to Fort Sumner. He was nearly dead by the time the drive reached the post, Wilson wrote.

Wilson and Goodnight concluded that only amputation would save Loving’s life. The doctor had never removed a limb and was reluctant to attempt such surgery. “The doctor was trying to cure it without cutting it off,” Wilson wrote.

Goodnight sent a rider to Santa Fe to bring back an experienced surgeon. In the meantime, they convinced the doctor to try an amputation, but it was too late, and Loving died. “I believe he would have fully recovered if the doctor…had been a competent surgeon,” Wilson concluded.

Loving, whose life ended on Sept. 25, had made Goodnight promise to return his body Texas lest it “lie in alien soil,” Judith Rigler wrote in a 1982 issue of the Seguin, Tex., Gazette-Enterprise.

Though Loving had to be temporarily interred at Fort Sumner, Goodnight ultimately had his friend exhumed, according to Rigler. “A tin casket was fashioned out of oil cans beaten out and soldered together,” she wrote. “The wooden casket containing Loving’s remains was placed inside and packed with charcoal before the tin lid was sealed.”

She quoted from Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman by J. Evitts Haley: “Upon February 8, 1868, with six big mules strung out in harness, and with rough-hewn but tenderly sympathetic cowmen from Texas riding ahead and behind, the strangest and most touching cavalcade in the history of the cow country took the Goodnight and Loving Trail that led to Loving’s home.”

Loving was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Weatherford, Rigler wrote.

Berry_Craig_Mug

Berry Craig of Mayfield is a professor emeritus of history from West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and the author of five books on Kentucky history, including True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo and Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase. Reach him at bcraig8960@gmail.com


Related Posts

Leave a Comment